How can I respawn a mesh if an item is dropped?

Development Programming & Scripting
1

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on implementing an item system and am trying to figure out how to implement spawning/despawning meshes when dropping and picking up items. I’ve seen a few examples where an actor’s UStaticMeshComponent is destroyed on pickup, but how would I go about respawning that mesh when the item is dropped? Any tips are helpful at this point.

2

Add it again i guess :slight_smile: You name from component decleration

AddComponent(FName("Mesh"), false, FTransform(), NULL);
3

I didn’t feel okay with destroying the mesh just for hiding/showing purposes, so I implemented it in the following way (I don’t know if this is the “right” way of doing it). I don’t have access to my code at the moment, but this is the general gist of it.

  1. On AActor::PostInitializeComponents, I store a reference to my UStaticMeshComponent’s StaticMesh member in a private UStaticMesh* variable.
  2. On pickup (called on an overlap event), I call UStaticMeshComponent::SetStaticMesh with a nullptr as its argument so the mesh will no longer be displayed. At this point, I also disable my collision detection and add the item to the player’s inventory.
  3. On drop, I call UStaticMeshComponent::SetStaticMesh again, this time providing my private UStaticMesh* variable as its argument. This will display the mesh again and I turn my collision detection on again. When dropping, I update the item’s location to be the player’s location + FVector(100, 0, 0) and apply a little impulse to simulate a throwing/dropping action.

I’ll see if I can dig up a concrete example for this later, but this is the general way I handled it.